Premiere: Black Therapy – ‘Echoes Of Dying Memories’
Boy, have I got a treat for your Thursday morning/afternoon
Italy’s Black Therapy has been honing their melodic death metal craft for a decade, just outside the brightest spotlight, yet steadily approaching with each release. On 2016’s In The Embrace of Sorrow, I Smile, the quintet took a turn from the rougher output of their earlier years, rounding out their sound and leaving many of the previously dominant chains of tremolos behind in favour of a more wallowing sense of morose sad-boy melodies, though the jagged riffs that laid down the rhythmic backbone of the band still largely remained.
Echoes of Dying Memories sees the band return after massive line-up changes, with everyone around vocalist Giuseppe Massimiliano Di Giorgio, whom long time readers may remember from Tech-Death Thursday visitors Eyeconoclast, being either new or having had their duties re-assigned. It’s another step on a darker, more introspective path and further smoothens the band’s edges, which isn’t to say Black Therapy would have become sterile, plastic or clinical, in this particular case The Smoothening (the relation of this this occurrence to The Quickening remains unknown) has left their music thicker, fuller and darker – in some ways more mature, in every way better.
Black Therapy embraces many of melodeath’s stylistic ends, with both doomier undertones and meatier bursts, spry leadwork and lingering atmosphere. Remarkable feat that not all the great names of the genre manage, without the aid of keyboards, gothic forays or clean vocals – outside one guest spot. It is with pleasure that I present to you the title track of their said, upcoming full-length – Echoes of Dying Memories. One of the darkest songs on the album, a slow, anguished roam fringed with forlorn leads.
Echoes of Dying Memories comes out on Black Lion Records, on March 15th – that’s next week’s Friday. Pre-order it from Bandcamp, and keep an eye on Black Lion Records’ Twitter handle, or just plain like the label and the band on Facebook.
